Togas, Rugby, Curling and a bit of work on the side

I was down in Dunedin (home of the mini) for field work a couple of weeks ago with Tod and Matt from work and we happened to coincide with O week at Otago University. The uni is a pretty big part of the Dunedin lifestyle, so for the entire week, the city was full of freshers and others celebrating the start of the uni year (read as: drinking lots and walking around the city wearing crazy costumes!). One of the traditions at Otago is that all freshers have to dress in togas for an event on the Tuesday night of O week. Just imagine, the middle of the city flooded with drunk kids in togas.... scary!!
Also while we were down in Dunedin, in between the mountains of work we had to do, we managed to catch a super 14 rugby game at Carisbrook (apparently known as the House of Pain) between the Highlanders and the Stormers. It was the first rugby game I've ever been to and it was pretty fun (especially watching the students go mental on the hill). I must say though, for me even live rugby doesn't really have the same level of excitement as a soccer match or even AFL. I'm probably offending all kiwis by saying this - maybe I just need to understand the rules better. But even the crowd around us wasn't as vocal as I'm used to from watching other sports. Apparently though, according to Matt and Tod, I shouldn't make any decisions until I've been to a Chiefs game in Hamilton. And I do like it when they do the pants up thing.....

We were down in Dunedin for a week, and, because we're such efficient workers, we ended up with a free day on the Sunday. None of us had done much exploring around Otago, so we decided to take a trip west from Dunedin to central Otago and see what we could find. As it turned out, we drove for a couple of hours, into the middle of nowhere, to a place called Ranfurly where they just happened to be having an art deco weekend (complete with awesome costumes to compliment their art deco buildings). Then we trucked on to a tiny little town called Naseby (really and truly in the middle of nowhere) which was home to the New Zealand Olympic Curling Team!! Tod is Canadian, so he got pretty excited about the whole idea of curling and insisted we have a go. And it was great! Kind of like lawn bowls but on ice and a whole lot more exciting because you get to do the sweeping thing too.

Here's Matt and me doing some sweeping And here's Tod throwing a stone and doing a bit of skidding along on his knees (the special Canadian technique!) Note too, his professional footwear....

So much fun! I think it goes down as one of my favourite ridiculous sports to play, right up there with bocce and croquet. I'm trying to convince my collegue Margaret to come curling with me when we're in Dunedin again next week.....

This last pic is just to demonstrate that we did actually do work while we were away too!

Check out their sexy fluro yellow work shirts.... I'm so jealous I don't have one!